It is hard to believe in 2011 that 15% of data centers have no plans for backing up their data, and thus no chance of recovery after a major operational issue or worse, a data center disaster. With software upgrades and power issues being the main cause of data center disruptions, this lack of basic protection is too risky. Perhaps the data is actually irrelevant to the organizations success, but this seems most unlikely. It?s hard to believe an IT professional could exclude backup from the operation unless under extreme budgetary pressures and even then, one might think the issue would have been escalated to senior management. The risk is too great!
With sufficiently generous Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), ad hoc contacting the vendor may be a suitable strategy for the SMB experiencing a localized disaster, but it is not going to work for a regional disaster. In any event, one might expect recovery in a matter of days if not weeks under these circumstances. Can the business survive, keep its clients, reputation, credit and its shareholders while experiencing this magnitude of downtime. The larger organization certainly cannot. With tighter RPO and RTO requirements, the larger organization would typically expect to repurpose dev/test configurations located at an alternate site, albeit operating at less than 100% efficiency, until able to build out to original capabilities. Alternatively, contracting for resources at a third party in event of a disaster is an acceptable solution, but one that of course requires that the data is also be protected off-site.
I?m still shocked and curious to hear more about the rationale behind these surprising statistics. Given that the survey covered small and large organizations worldwide, it is possible some small to medium businesses may not see their data and its protection as important to their business or even vaguely related, but that is really hard to imagine.
The major outcome of this survey should be to motivate every business manager at every level to ensure that his IT support is itself supported by appropriate backup and disaster protection capabilities. Don?t be afraid to ask the question. ?How do you protect my data, and if my data is damaged, how long will it take you to get it back?? And get it in writing!
Dick benton, Principal Consultant, GlassHouse technologies
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